When running for president, one should expect that all of the skeletons in his/her closet are going to be exposed. Hillary Clinton was not immune from this symptom of presidential candidacy. One of the largest scandals in her bid to become the first woman president has revolved around Clinton’s use of a private e-mail, rather than a .gov one, during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State.
In March of this year, the New York Times broke the news about this scandal. While Clinton may not have violated any laws, the practice of using a privately-owned server for State Department work is not a typical government practice. (Although there have been Secretary of States who have done it in the past, including Colin Powell.) Nonetheless, using a private e-mail gave Clinton control over what she made public and what she kept private, as the government could only see what she gave them access to in her .gov account.
Her lawyers turned over 55,000 pages of e-mails that were sent on Clinton’s private email to the State Department who have in turn been releasing some e-mails at the end of every month. The most recent batch of emails, about 7,000 pages, were released on the last night of August.
About 125 of these emails have been marked classified. According to the New York Times, State Department spokesperson Mark Toner clarified that none of these emails were classified when they were sent. They have all, however, been retroactively declared to be classified.
One example of such an e-mail was an exchange between Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which Clinton asked Blair to go to the Middle East in order to help out with the peace process. He responded that he was “ready to speak when convenient but should do it on a secure line.” A later follow up email from Blair has been marked as classified.
Also among the redacted e-mails was an e-mail from Jake Sullivan, one of Clinton’s top aides, about the Russian foreign minister, as well as most of her response. She also sent an email to Sullivan with the subject “Gaza”, which was entirely redacted aside from the line “pls see the memcon (memorandum of conversation) for details.”
In addition to large amounts of classified information in the emails, there were also many entertaining things discovered which gave the public a glimpse into Clinton’s personality. New York Magazine even ran an article about these emails suggesting that they “might well do what generations of Clinton press teams have been unable to do: effectively chip away at long-held perceptions of Hillary as inscrutable, unrelatable, and unlikable.”
One of the more amusing things that was discovered among the thousands of pages recently released is an e-mail that was sent to Sullivan and Richard Verma, the former assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, with a single question: “Where are we on this?” The subject of the e-mail reads “Gefilte Fish.” (There is, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, involving a possible 120 percent import duty on carp that was farmed in Illinois.)
The emails revealed that Clinton’s favorite TV shows are The Good Wife and Parks and Recreation, as in a January 2010 email she asked one of her staffers what time the shows were on.
She also wasn’t an expert on her own voting record, and in December of that year emailed a staffer asking about how many times she voted against raising the debt limit.
When she was informed that a man had hidden his face during a bank robbery with a Hillary Clinton mask, she replied “Should I be flattered? Even a little bit?” She was told in response that, while bank robbers had in the past used masks of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Richard Nixon, “we appear to be the first Democrat.”
Even late night personalities are putting in their two cents about this newest batch of emails. Seth Meyers recently ran a segment on his show called “Hillary Clin-Tron: Tech Genius”, citing e-mails including one with the subject “I-Pad Questions” which asks “Do I need to charge [the iPad]? If so, how? I have no cords.” Meyers went on to express his disbelief that Clinton is running some kind of e-mail conspiracy, saying “She’s not Edward Snowden, she’s more like Betty White.”
On September 8th, Clinton formally apologized for using a private email server, stating, “I’m sorry about it, and I take full responsibility.” She emphasized that everything she did was allowed by State Department regulations, and nothing that she sent or received was classified at the time.
Clinton is trying to be as transparent as possible about this issue, and is testifying next month in front of the Benghazi Committee about it. She encourages people to read more about the issue, or even the emails themselves, and has an entire page on her website dedicated to her emails.
It remains to be seen how much of a role these emails will continue to play in her bid for the presidency.